Tips for Helping Your Dyslexic Child Learn to Read

Teaching a dyslexic child to read seems challenging. If you are in such a situation and are perturbed about what to do, don’t worry. Your child can definitely learn to read. However, you’ll have to take some extra efforts. You’ll also have to learn a lot of new things. Thus, while helping your child learn, you’ll learn a lot too. Take this opportunity to fight challenges, know about new inventions and developments and you’ll be encouraged and gain confidence.

What Signs Your Dyslexic Child Shows while Reading?

It can be understood that finding your child to be dyslexic is not a pleasant thing, rather it’s very unpleasant. You might know that dyslexic people cannot read properly because they find it difficult to learn names and sounds of letters. They also face trouble identifying letters in words and their names too.

Thus if your child doesn’t show any interest in reading but loves if you read to him, reads slowly and inaccurately, skips or misreads small words, spell words poorly etc. he is dyslexic.

Using Phonics to Teach Reading to Dyslexics

Phonics lessons made for dyslexic students should help them gain a higher understanding of the basic principles of English.

What is phonics? Well, phonics is a technique of teaching reading and writing by creating phonemic awareness in the learner. Phonics is extremely important to help children start to read. Once they crack the code of reading through phonics, they gain the ability to find out the length and breadth of literacy all together.

Phonics lessons teach dyslexic students to distinguish all 44 sounds clearly, while illustrating the details of how sounds match the letters at the same time.

Starting with the Basics

Dyslexic children should know the fact about English language that each sound can be written in more than one way. Dyslexic students can gain confidence by learning this basic fact about English. It makes them clear that how actually the language works. This clearness will help to mitigate the confusion and worries and give them a stable base to develop intellectual self-esteem.

Phonic Lessons

First off, it should be established if a child is facing any trouble while distinguishing among any of the 44 speech sounds. Some subtle phonological distinction may be missed. E.g. it’s not uncommon for dyslexic students to find it difficult distinguishing between “f” and “th” sounds.

Memory

When your child is learning to spell sound by sound, you need to make her aware that memory should be importantly used in this process. She should remember how letters are combined while blending and segmenting.

All in all, you should have a lot of patience, desire to learn and make your child learn to read, and persistence to accomplish the mission. But it’s sure that your distress will vanish if any during the process and you’ll enjoy the task, ultimately to get good results.